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Benefits of Musichttps://kloverpianostudio.com/2014/07/01/benefits-of-music/
Tue, 01 Jul 2014 19:52:14 +0000http://kloverpianostudio.com/2014/07/01/benefits-of-music/Here are many articles on the wonderful benefits music has for us: On becoming a music major (Forbes) https://www.forbes.com/sites/lizryan/2017/06/04/ten-reasons-to-let-your-kid-major-in-music/#41f1f03f1062 Here’s another study showing how powerful piano lessons are in the development of language skills: http://time.com/5322121/music-lessons-language-learning/ This article discusses how learning a musical instrument is similar to learning the language of mathematics: Here’s […]
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The multimillion dollar brain training industry is under attack. In October 2014, a group of over 100 eminent neuroscientists and psychologists wrote an open letter warning that “claims promoting brain games are frequently exaggerated and at times misleading.” In 2016, industry giant Lumosity was fined $2m, and ordered to refund thousands of customers who were duped by false claims that the company’s products improve general mental abilities and slow the progression of age-related decline in mental abilities. And a recent review examining studies purporting to show the benefits of such products found “little evidence … that training improves improves everyday cognitive performance.”

While brain training games and apps may not live up to their hype, it is well established that certain other activities and lifestyle choices can have neurological benefits that promote overall brain health and may help to keep the mind sharp as we get older. One of these is musical training. Research shows that learning to play a musical instrument is beneficial for children and adults alike, and may even be helpful to patients recovering from brain injuries.

“Music probably does something unique,” explains neuropsychologist Catherine Loveday of the University of Westminster. “It stimulates the brain in a very powerful way, because of our emotional connection with it.”

Playing a musical instrument is a rich and complex experience that involves integrating information from the senses of vision, hearing, and touch, as well as fine movements, and learning to do so can induce long-lasting changes in the brain. Professional musicians are highly skilled performers who spend years training, and they provide a natural laboratory in which neuroscientists can study how such changes – referred to as experience-dependent plasticity – occur across their lifespan.

Changes in brain structure

Early brain scanning studies revealed significant differences in brain structure between musicians and non-musicians of the same age. For example, the corpus callosum, a massive bundle of nerve fibres connecting the two sides of the brain, is significantly larger in musicians. The brain areas involved in movement, hearing, and visuo-spatial abilities also appear to be larger in professional keyboard players. And, the area devoted to processing touch sensations from the left hand is increased in violinists.

These studies compared data from different groups of people at one point in time. As such, they could not determine whether the observed differences were actually caused by musical training, or if existing anatomical differences predispose some to become musicians. But later, longitudinal studies that track people over time have shown that young children who do 14 months of musical training exhibit significant structural (pdf) and functional brain changes (pdf) compared to those who do not.

Together, these studies show that learning to play a musical instrument not only increases grey matter volume in various brain regions, but can also strengthen the long-range connections between them. Other research shows that musical training also enhances verbal memory, spatial reasoning, and literacy skills, such that professional musicians usually outperform non-musicians on these abilities.

Long-lasting benefits for musicians

Importantly, the brain scanning studies show that the extent of anatomical change in musicians’ brains is closely related to the age at which musical training began, and the intensity of training. Those who started training at the youngest age showed the largest changes when compared to non-musicians.

Even short periods of musical training in early childhood can have long-lasting benefits. In one 2013 study, for example, researchers recruited 44 older adults and divided them into three groups based on the level of formal musical training they had received as children. Participants in one group had received no training at all; those in the second had done a little training, defined as between one and three years of lessons; and those in the third had received moderate levels of training (four to 14 years).

The researchers played recordings of complex speech sounds to the participants, and used scalp electrodes to measure the timing of neural responses in a part of the auditory brainstem. As we age, the precision of this timing deteriorates, making it difficult to understand speech, especially in environments with a lot of background noise. Participants who had received moderate amounts of musical training exhibited the fastest neural responses, suggesting that even limited training in childhood can preserve sharp processing of speech sounds and increase resilience to age-related decline in hearing.

Unlike commercial brain training products, which only improve performance on the skills involved, musical training has what psychologists refer to as transfer effects – in other words, learning to play a musical instrument seems to have a far broader effect on the brain and mental function, and improves other abilities that are seemingly unrelated.

“Music reaches parts of the brain that other things can’t,” says Loveday. “It’s a strong cognitive stimulus that grows the brain in a way that nothing else does, and the evidence that musical training enhances things like working memory and language is very robust.”

Learning to play a musical instrument, then, seems to be one of the most effective forms of brain training there is. Musical training can induce various structural and functional changes in the brain, depending on which instrument is being learned, and the intensity of the training regime. It’s an example of how dramatically life-long experience can alter the brain so that it becomes adapted to the idiosyncrasies of its owner’s lifestyle.

This post originally appeared on The Guardian. This article is republished here with permission.

Despite more than three decades of generous private and government support for the arts, arts education in the United States can boast of only meager results. In this time of diminished funding and growing skepticism, the solo oboist of the New York Philharmonic explains what was so crucial in his own musical education—and why it is precisely what is missing, and needed, in arts education today.

By Joseph Robinson

I have been oboist of the New York Philharmonic for 18 seasons, but many fans and colleagues still view my success as unlikely—even miraculous— because of two peculiarities in my résumé. The first is that I grew up in a small town in North Carolina instead of the kind of cosmopolitan urban center that produces most classical musicians; the second is that I attended a liberal arts college rather than a conservatory. But in fact these “handicaps” were crucial assets in my improbable rise to the top of the orchestra world.

For as long as anyone can remember, Lenoir, North Carolina, has called itself “Gateway to the Blue Ridge Parkway.” In 1954, however, it was known chiefly for two things: the manufacture of quality wooden furniture and a remarkable high school band. Most of the town’s 8,000 residents worked for Broyhill, Bernhardt, Kent-Coffey, or one of the dozen or so other furniture manufacturers. What was surprising was how many of their sons and daughters played in the high school band.

That band was created in 1924, the product of miscalculation rather than prescience. The local American Legion had formed a band a few years earlier, hoping to march up Main Street on Armistice Day to its own music. When the Legionnaires wearied of all the hard work, the blatts and the squawks, they donated their 24 instruments to the local high school.

The Legion’s conductor, Captain James C. Harper, a wealthy scion of one of the local furniture families, agreed to give some of his time to the school “just to get things started.” The Captain—whose title stuck from his World War I commission—stayed for 50 years, betting his entire life and family fortune on the premise that no foundation board of directors would have accepted—namely, that a handful of mountain children in North Carolina deserved to have a conservatory education free of charge.

The site of that education was a three-story brick building that stood on West Harper Avenue, directly behind the main school building. It boasted 18 practice rooms, a magnificent rehearsal room, offices and storage rooms, locker rooms for boys and girls, and a library full of music, records, and scores. The band itself had three sets of uniforms, as well as a fleet of buses and instrument trucks to transport it to events around the region, including parades, gubernatorial inaugurations and halftimes of the Carolina-Virginia football games.

Of the five full-time faculty members, the brass teacher had once played solo cornet in the Sousa Band, the woodwind teacher had studied with the Philadelphia Orchestra’s legendary clarinetist, Ralph McLean, and the marching band director was the brother of Metropolitan Opera soprano Dorothy Kirsten. The best instruments in the world at that time—Heckel bassoons, Lorée oboes, Buffet clarinets, Conn horns and trumpets, and Selmer trombones—were made available to band members at no cost. And when I entered the band in 1954, a 30- year tradition of success loomed menacingly overhead, threatening to bring vengeance upon any of us who betrayed the standard.

What resulted from Captain Harper’s provincial experiment in music education were instrumental proficiency and professional achievement that defy all demographic probability. From my era alone, the Lenoir High School Band produced the tuba player of the Minnesota Orchestra, the principal bassoonist of the Dallas Symphony, a successful New York free- lance flutist, and the first oboist of the New York Philharmonic. Another “wave” 10 years later yielded the composer in residence of the St. Louis Symphony, a percussionist with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, a prominent North Carolina trumpeter, and a professor of clarinet at the University of North Carolina. There were dozens of others before and after—the stalwarts of the band who had more than enough talent for careers in music. Many of them remain in Lenoir, still recalling their band experiences as the most challenging and fulfilling of ! their lives.

We were not a remarkable group. Bassoonist Wilfred Roberts was the son of a cabinetmaker and a schoolteacher; he played organ in Lower Creek Baptist Church and exhibited prize-winning steers at the county fair each year. When she wasn’t practicing flute, Katherine Menefee waitressed at her father’s café, the Gateway, where the rest of her family pitched in to cook, clean up, and count whatever change had come in by the end of the day. Lynn Bernhardt’s father ran the hardware store (which may explain why she chose percussion), and tuba- player Ross Tolbert was a good-natured farm boy with the reddest neck you ever saw.

The point is, we were just average North Carolina kids. What was not average was the band itself. It remains the most effective instrumental training program I have ever known—and proof beyond doubt that talent lies everywhere, waiting to be tapped. If Captain Harper and his colleagues could find children behind mountain rocks and in trailer parks at the end of red clay roads and turn them into competitive classical musicians, then education can accomplish anything.

Unfortunately, Davidson College did not keep musical pace with the Lenoir High School Band, but it did provide the quality liberal education my father insisted I receive. My first appearance as an oboist at college was atop a table in the Phi Delt house, accompanying a pledge brother in “Columbus Stockade Blues,” for which achievement I was invited to eat a jar of peanut butter on the spot. The first rehearsal of the college wind ensemble was scarcely more promising, with 12 students (four of them saxophonists) showing up to slog their way through Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.

In the middle of my sophomore year, I considered transferring to Oberlin, where I could have studied in its outstanding conservatory while pursuing a degree in English. But increasing involvement in orchestras around Davidson gradually compensated for the absence of on-campus opportunities. As well as playing regularly in the Charlotte Symphony and the Greenville (South Carolina) Symphony, I joined a number of pick-up groups and spent my summers as an eight-hour-a- day oboe player at Tanglewood and the Brevard Music Center.

Sticking it out at Davidson, I ended up with an excellent transcript and a Fulbright grant to study government support of the arts in West Germany. And it was thanks to the Fulbright that I had the opportunity to seek out the greatest oboist of the 20th century—Marcel Tabuteau.

Born in France, Tabuteau was the archetypal émigré musician, one of the first of the hundreds who staffed America’s orchestras in their infancy. He was recruited for the New York Philharmonic by Walter Damrosch in 1903, played for Arturo Toscanini in the Metropolitan Opera until 1913, and then spent 39 years as principal oboist in the Philadelphia Orchestra. During that time, teaching at the Curtis Institute, he created a distinctively “American school” of oboe playing and guided his students to virtual domination of the field. But in 1954, following political battles with musical director Eugene Ormandy, Tabuteau returned to France, resolving never to play or teach again.

Sitting at a sidewalk cafe in Nice one March afternoon in 1963, I pondered my chances of meeting the man who had rejected the overtures of oboe students from Curtis, Juilliard, and Eastman for so many years. Captain Harper’s favorite advice came to mind at just the critical moment: “Strike while the iron is hot.” In one of those 51-to-49 decisions that sometimes make all the difference in life, I got up and walked to Tabuteau’s apartment. The great man was not at home, but his maid let me in long enough to write a hasty note explaining who I was and saying that I hoped to return at 8 p.m. “just to shake your hand,” When I arrived, Tabuteau himself answered the door and graciously ushered me inside.

“So you’re the one!” he exclaimed. “You don’t look like an oboe player!” At dinner that evening, and during the next day, when we explored the nearby fields in search of reed- making oboe cane, Tabuteau treated me like a grandson and told me that I reminded him of himself as a young man. It proved to be a further stroke of good fortune that I had left my instrument in Paris for repairs, because when Tabuteau invited me to return to Nice that summer to study with him, he had never heard me play a single note on the oboe. Only when I returned to Nice in July did he reveal his motive for my unprecedented reception. At age 76 he had one unfinished piece of business—to produce a method book that would codify his principles of the American school of oboe playing. And when Tabuteau met me, an oboe-playing English major, he was sure God had send him his scribe.

If Davidson opened Tabuteau’s door for me that spring, the five weeks of lessons I had with him the following summer opened the door to my professional career, more than compensating for the conservatory training I had never received. Tabuteau astonished me repeatedly with his mastery of elements of playing I had not known even existed. In an eight-note phrase of his own invention, he would trace an arc through time, then change the inflections of notes along the curve in terms of shape, color, and articulation. He would establish a rhythmic pulse, then retard it or speed it up, with magical effect. He adorned his tone with a multilayered vibrato, his melody with ingenious ornamentation. And the effect of it all was to demonstrate, beyond any doubt, that the artistic challenge of playing an instrument is infinite, limited only by a player’s imagination, perception, and discipline.

In a letter he penned a year and a half later, in December 1965, Tabuteau promised to help me “join the club of [his] star pupils” if I would return to Nice to assist him with his method book. Tabuteau died just two weeks later, before either of us could put his offer to the test. But almost 12 years to the day after he wrote that letter, I won the national audition to succeed the great Harold Gomberg as solo oboe of the New York Philharmonic. Ironically, my undergraduate degree played a decisive role again, by sustaining me through the audition process—the most important opportunity in my career.

Auditions are musical decathlons—torturous lists of the most difficult excerpts from the repertory, any of which would be sufficient challenge in a typical subscription concert. Because of this, it is often harder to win an orchestra position than to retain it.

An audition tests a player’s skills in every direction at once—and usually attempts to do so in under 12 minutes. Adding to the difficulty, I came to the audition with what I was certain was a distinct disadvantage. Although I had played principal oboe in the Atlanta Symphony for six years, I was teaching at the North Carolina School of the Arts when the New York audition was announced. As a result, I knew that the audition committee members had less interest in me than in some of the “very important oboists” who were waiting in the wings when I stepped out onto the Avery Fisher Hall stage to begin playing. But then things seemed to turn my way.

Instead of performing for 10 minutes, I was asked to strain in the traces for an hour and 20 minutes, until I could no longer hold my lips on the reed. I flew back to North Carolina confident that my extended trial boded well.

Three days later the Philharmonic’s personnel manager, James Chambers, called to tell me that the music director Zubin Mehta had judged my tone “too big” for the New York Philharmonic. Two players had been called back, but I was not one of them. At that moment my candidacy for Gomberg’s job should have ended. Instead, at 3 a.m.—my Davidson College muse stirring within me—I rose from bed to pen a letter to Chambers, arguing that since it was impossible for any player to surpass Harold Gomberg’s heroic tone, the acoustics of the empty stage must have created a misconception. I added that the Philharmonic would not make a mistake by hiring either of the remaining candidates, but it would make a mistake by excluding me “if tone were really the issue.” Several days later, Chambers called me again, this time to say that he had read my letter to Mehta in Los Angeles and that they agreed it could no! t have been “more persuasive or fortuitous.” In the final audition, to which I was not invited, I won unanimously—and the winning lottery ticket had Davidson College written all over it.

When I was 16 years old and crazy about the oboe, my father warned me, “Son, this music business is like religion; just don’t go off the deep end.” In the nearly 40 years since then, I can report that I have been to the musical mountaintop as well as off the deep end. I have performed with Stokowski, Horowitz, and Casals. I have recorded Mahler with Leonard Bernstein, Brahms with Isaac Stern, Tchaikovsky with Emil Gilels, and Dvorak with Yo Yo Ma. Nearly 3,000 concerts have taken me five times to Asia and Europe, and four times to South America. I have appeared on dozens of television programs, many of which still circulate as videotapes around the world. The best moments have been breathtaking, transcendent, and unforgettable, and each reminds me of what Tabuteau once said when I asked him whether he could remember any “best moments” in his long career. Pausing for a moment and looking towa! rd the Alps, he said, “There were a few good notes … there were a few good notes … and they are still ringing!” Ultimately, it was for the sake of the “good notes” that Captain Harper started so many mountain youngsters on a lifelong quest for musical truth. And certainly it was for their sake that Tabuteau wanted me to write his method book.

Without realizing it, I think my father also touched upon something quintessential in pointing to the connection between music and religion.

Faith in the transcendent and redemptive power of the arts was at the heart of the Rockefeller Panel Report’s resounding affirmation in 1965—that “the arts should be for the many and not the privileged few; should be at the center and not the periphery of society.” It is a credo that inspired the “culture boom” in America at the time my professional career was just beginning. In fact, I came of age with the National Endowment for the Arts and in a very real sense bet my life on the premises that inspired its creation.

In 1966, the Ford Foundation introduced its colossal program of matching grants for symphony orchestras—the same year Title III programs began spending $75 million annually on arts enrichment in the schools. Arts councils sprang up everywhere; corporations initiated new sponsorships for programs in theater, dance, and painting; experts declared that increased leisure in America would turn us all, if not into Rembrandts, at least into avid consumers of high culture. In such a time of blue-sky optimism, everyone seemed to rush out for an arts tan.

Thirty years later, there has been a serious change of weather. As Martha Wilson, director of an avant-garde theater in New York put it in the New York Times recently, “The climate that was once warm is now cold, and we will have to find other ways to survive.” Foundations that led the way into arts patronage in the 1960’s led the way out in the 1980s; corporations that once contributed, discretely, out of sense of good citizenship, now wave their sponsorship banners at performing arts events, demanding marketing “bang” for their bucks. These extravaganzas often fill entire concert halls with customers who care more about the pre- performance cocktail party than the performance itself. Even the National Endowment for the Arts is on death row, facing the prospect of fiscal starvation within two years. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent to introduce the arts to new consumers in the past three decades, aging and diminishing audiences threaten our most venerable institutions.

The national infatuation with the arts now seems to have been only skin deep, and the tan is quickly fading.

What went wrong? I believe a naive assumption underlay thousands of showcase events that were staged throughout the 1970s and ’80s in schools, malls, churches and inner-city storefronts. It was the notion that the arts would prove irresistible if they were brought to the uninitiated. Establishing vast bureaucracies of arts administrators and funders, we employed thousands of musicians, actors, dancers, and painters to accomplish the goal. But while enrichment and inspiration did indeed flow from many of the performances, “exposure programs” seemed in general to benefit the performers and producers far more than the audiences.

In my experiences as a clinician at hundreds of school concerts of different kinds, I found that very few young observers were more persuaded than impressed by what they witnessed. The lesson we slowly learned was a basic one: it is not enough to hear the “arts language” spoken; children (and adults also) must learn to “speak” it if they are really to get the message.

“What do 80 percent of our audience have in common?” asks Gretchen Serrie, executive director of the Florida West Coast Symphony, in a letter this year to the Knight Foundation. “They have played a musical instrument. It is ‘hands-on’ musical experience, much more than early concert attendance, that has created our musical audience.” Serrie believes it is our orchestras’ greatest failure to have stood by and watched the dismantling of 50 percent of public school instrumental training programs nationwide since 1960. We have only just begun to reap the meager harvest of an educational policy that invested so much money in “show and tell” school concerts and so little in the choirs, bands, and orchestras that would have continued to make our children musically literate.

“Even now,” Serrie declares, “we play at children, rather than teach children to play. However creative our programs become, despite all the school concerts, workshops, enrichment programs, and integration of music teaching with other disciplines, there will be no [path] to the Symphony for the next generation unless there are strong instrumental training programs in the public schools.” For me there is no more poignant metaphor for the decline of these programs than the Lenoir High School Band building as it stands—or barely stands—today.

The floor is rotting, the ceiling is falling; tiles have dropped from the walls and windows are broken everywhere. The once-exuberant hallways are silent and forlorn. In the name of educational progress, the Lenoir school system was replaced in the mid-1970s by a regional network of schools. The band’s instruments and music were distributed among four county high schools; the scrapbooks and endowment, along with other expensive equipment, went to Davidson College (where, ironically, students with musical interests now receive better instrumental training than do students in Lenoir). In short, the Lenoir High School Band no longer exists. Like hundreds of other programs that vanished or were seriously curtailed after the start of the space race, it was a casualty of educational priorities that shifted radically toward math and science and away from the arts and humanities.

Some 2,400 years ago, at the height of a civilization that in so many ways inspired our own, Plato prescribed the ideal curriculum for the most promising children of Athens: music and sport until age 16, then mathematics and moral philosophy to complete the education of future philosopher-kings. His plan has found contemporary endorsement in the work of Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, who theorizes that the highest manifestations of human intelligence are music, spatial, kinesthetic, and empathic, as well as mathematical and verbal. Not long ago the New York Times reported that college students who listened to a Mozart piano concerto for 20 minutes before taking a strenuous examination did 10 percent better than those who did not. Professor Rauscher, of the University of California at Irvine, has tested young children before and after eight months of regular piano and voice training, ! and dis covered that their spatial perceptions increased 35 percent as a result of musical activity, which enhanced apparently unrelated potentials within the brain. The startling implication is that music seems to make us smarter. Perhaps Plato was right all along. In any case, it is certainly time to reconsider the idea that human beings need wholeness in their development if they are, as the saying goes, not only to “do the thing right” but to “do the right thing.” With that idea in mind, many American orchestras have begun to forge new partnerships with local schools in hopes of reinstating instrumental training for all students. The most dramatic example of this effort is a project in Boston involving the Boston Symphony, the New England Conservatory, and the WGBH Foundation. At the New York Philharmonic, educational programs are tailored to all ages, while “adopt-a-school” initiatives involve orchestra musicians in on-site teaching, supervision, and teacher training. But well ! meaning as all such efforts are, they are still inadequate.

Orchestras themselves cannot possibly fill the shoes of thousands of music educators and administrators who were once charged with day-to-day music instruction but who now no longer have jobs. In the end what is really needed is to rebuild the Lenoir High School Band and to create about 500 other programs just like it across the United States.

If skeptics think that is impossible, I should add that I recently encountered an astounding high school band that reminded me of Lenoir’s. While on tour with the Philharmonic, I was invited to give master classes at a school in a city not far from one of our concert venues. I was met at the local train station by a white-gloved chauffeur, who drove me directly to the front entrance of the school. There I encountered three television crews and dozens of students, some of whom held little bunches of flowers in their hands. The mayor of the city sat in a prominent place as I coached young performers in a woodwind quintet by Jacques Ibert. Then the entire ensemble—about 90 students—appeared in full dress to play a band arrangement of Leonard Bernstein’s overture to Candide. The piece was performed with feverish intensity in a rendition as memorable for the pride and quality of the students’ com! mitment as for its musical excellence. Afterward, in the director’s office, surrounded by a large staff of assistants and dozens of trophies, awards and photographs, I felt strangely at home, once again in the Lenoir High School Band … in Okayama, Japan!

~

Here are many articles on the wonderful benefits music has for us:

Why You Should Enroll Your Kids in Piano Lessons, According to Science

With 88 keys and hundreds of internal strings, a standard piano produces a slew of unique sounds and tones. And mastering that complex system doesn’t only result in beautiful music — a new study says it can also help kids build up their language skills.

“There’s evidence that early exposure to piano practice enhances the processing of sounds that extend not only from music, but also into language,” says John Gabrieli, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and the co-author of the paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Building on an existing body of research on music and childhood development, the authors pinpoint a specific way that piano lessons can help young children enhance their language processing skills. As kids’ ears become trained to distinguish between different pitches and tones at the piano, Gabrieli explains, they also seem to get better at parsing subtle differences between spoken words, a key element of language acquisition.

For the study, researchers sorted 74 Mandarin-speaking Chinese kindergarteners, all of whom were either 4 or 5 years old, into three groups. One group took three 45-minute piano lessons each week, one group got the same amount of additional reading instruction, and the final group did neither.

After six months, the groups showed no significant differences in general measures of cognitive ability — things like IQ, memory and attention span — but the piano group had distinguished itself in one key way.

Even compared to their peers in the extra reading group, children who took piano lessons were significantly better at distinguishing between spoken words that differed by only one consonant, Gabrieli explains. (Both the piano and reading groups performed better than the control group at differentiating between vowels.) This, he says, suggests that piano lessons affect a crucial and complex element of language processing.

Consonants, like “T” and “D”, can sound so similar that the human brain has to make a snap decision about what it’s hearing. “Consonants require a bit more precision to tell one from another than do vowels,” Gabrieli says. “The biggest benefit showed up where there’s the biggest challenge.”

This effect is “especially salient” for Mandarin speakers, Gabrieli says, because the oral language relies so heavily on subtle differences in tone. But he says other research has suggested that musical ability may offer similar benefits to speakers of non-tonal languages, such as English. While the current study looked specifically at piano lessons, Gabrieli says the findings “might well extend broadly to other musical education” as well.

The results were so striking that the school in Beijing where the study was performed continued to offer piano lessons to its young students even after the experiment ended. “The more advanced they are, the better they progress on [pitch discrimination], and it helps them with language development altogether,” Gabrieli says.

This article discusses how learning a musical instrument is similar to learning the language of mathematics:

Here’s information about the Benefits of Music (From the MTNA Website).

Did you know…?

The so-called “Mozart Effect” was an exaggeration: http://qz.com/628331/the-idea-that-mozart-makes-babies-smarter-is-one-of-parentings-most-bizarre-myths/ New research debunks the “Mozart Effect”.

The pace of scientific research into music making has never been greater. New data about music’s relationship to brainpower, wellness and other phenomena is changing the way we perceive mankind’s oldest art form, and it’s having a real-world effect on decisions about educational priorities.

The briefs below provide a glimpse into these exciting developments. For a more in-depth treatment of current music science, visit our affiliate, The International Foundation for Music Research.

Middle school and high school students who participated in instrumental music scored significantly higher than their non-band peers in standardized tests. University studies conducted in Georgia and Texas found significant correlations between the number of years of instrumental music instruction and academic achievement in math, science and language arts.

Source: University of Sarasota Study, Jeffrey Lynn Kluball; East Texas State University Study, Daryl Erick Trent

Students who were exposed to the music-based lessons scored a full 100 percent higher on fractions tests than those who learned in the conventional manner. Second-grade and third-grade students were taught fractions in an untraditional manner ‹ by teaching them basic music rhythm notation. The group was taught about the relationships between eighth, quarter, half and whole notes. Their peers received traditional fraction instruction.

Source: Neurological Research, March 15, 1999

Music majors are the most likely group of college grads to be admitted to medical school. Physician and biologist Lewis Thomas studied the undergraduate majors of medical school applicants. He found that 66 percent of music majors who applied to med school were admitted, the highest percentage of any group. For comparison, (44 percent) of biochemistry majors were admitted. Also, a study of 7,500 university students revealed that music majors scored the highest reading scores among all majors including English, biology, chemistry and math.

Sources: “The Comparative Academic Abilities of Students in Education and in Other Areas of a Multi-focus University,” Peter H. Wood, ERIC Document No. ED327480

“The Case for Music in the Schools,” Phi Delta Kappan, February, 1994

Music study can help kids understand advanced music concepts. A grasp of proportional math and fractions is a prerequisite to math at higher levels, and children who do not master these areas cannot understand more advanced math critical to high-tech fields. Music involves ratios, fractions, proportions and thinking in space and time. Second-grade students were given four months of piano keyboard training, as well as time using newly designed math software. The group scored over 27 percent higher on proportional math and fractions tests than children who used only the math software.

Source: Neurological Research March, 1999

Research shows that piano students are better equipped to comprehend mathematical and scientific concepts. A group of preschoolers received private piano keyboard lessons and singing lessons. A second group received private computer lessons. Those children who received piano/keyboard training performed 34 percent higher on tests measuring spatial-temporal ability than the others ‹ even those who received computer training. “Spatial-temporal” is basically proportional reasoning – ratios, fractions, proportions and thinking in space and time. This concept has long been considered a major obstacle in the teaching of elementary math and science.

Source: Neurological Research February 28, 1997

Young children with developed rhythm skills perform better academically in early school years. Findings of a recent study showed that there was a significant difference in the academic achievement levels of students classified according to rhythmic competency. Students who were achieving at academic expectation scored high on all rhythmic tasks, while many of those who scored lower on the rhythmic test achieved below academic expectation.Source: “The Relationship between Rhythmic Competency and Academic Performance in First Grade Children,” University of Central Florida, Debby Mitchell

High school music students score higher on SATs in both verbal and math than their peers. In 2001, SAT takers with coursework/experience in music performance scored 57 points higher on the verbal portion of the test and 41 points higher on the math portion than students with no coursework/experience in the arts.

Source: Profile of SAT and Achievement Test Takers, The College Board, compiled by Music Educators National Conference, 2001.

College-age musicians are emotionally healthier than their non-musician counterparts. A study conducted at the University of Texas looked at 362 students who were in their first semester of college. They were given three tests, measuring performance anxiety, emotional concerns and alcohol related problems. In addition to having fewer battles with the bottle, researchers also noted that the college-aged music students seemed to have surer footing when facing tests.

Source: Houston Chronicle, January 11, 1998

A ten-year study, tracking more than 25,000 students, shows that music-making improves test scores. Regardless of socioeconomic background, music-making students get higher marks in standardized tests than those who had no music involvement. The test scores studied were not only standardized tests, such as the SAT, but also in reading proficiency exams.

Source: Dr. James Catterall, UCLA, 1997

The world’s top academic countries place a high value on music education. Hungary, Netherlands and Japan stand atop worldwide science achievement and have strong commitment to music education. All three countries have required music training at the elementary and middle school levels, both instrumental and vocal, for several decades. The centrality of music education to learning in the top-ranked countries seems to contradict the United States’ focus on math, science, vocabulary, and technology.

Source: 1988 International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IAEEA) Test

Music training helps under-achievers. In Rhode Island, researchers studied eight public school first grade classes. Half of the classes became “test arts” groups, receiving ongoing music and visual arts training. In kindergarten, this group had lagged behind in scholastic performance. After seven months, the students were given a standardized test. The “test arts” group had caught up to their fellow students in reading and surpassed their classmates in math by 22 percent. In the second year of the project, the arts students widened this margin even further. Students were also evaluated on attitude and behavior. Classroom teachers noted improvement in these areas also.

This happens because rhythmic and other well-rehearsed responses require little to no cognitive or mental processing. They are influenced by the motor center of the brain that responds directly to auditory rhythmic cues. A person’s ability to engage in music, particularly rhythm playing and singing, remains intact late into the disease process because, again, these activities do not mandate cognitive functioning for success.

Music Associations. Most people associate music with important events and a wide array of emotions. The connection can be so strong that hearing a tune long after the occurrence evokes a memory of it.

Prior experience with the piece is the greatest indicator of an individual’s likely response. A melody that is soothing for one person may remind another of the loss of a loved one and be tragically sad.

If the links with the music are unknown, it is difficult to predict an individual’s response. Therefore, observe a person’s reaction to a particular arrangement and discontinue it if it evokes distress, such as agitation, facial grimaces or increasing muscular tension.

Top Ten Picks. Selections from the individual’s young adult years—ages 18 to 25—are most likely to have the strongest responses and the most potential for engagement.

Unfamiliar music can also be beneficial because it carries no memories or emotions. This may be the best choice when developing new responses, such as physical relaxation designed to manage stress or enhance sleep.

As individuals progress into late-stage dementia, music from their childhood, such as folk songs, work well. Singing these songs in the language in which they were learned sparks the greatest involvement.

Sound of Music. Typically, “stimulative music” activates, while “sedative music” quiets. Stimulative music, with percussive sounds and fairly quick tempos, tends to naturally promote movement, such as toe taps. Look to dance tunes of any era for examples. Slightly stimulative music can assist with activities of daily living: for example, at mealtime to rouse individuals who tend to fall asleep at the table or during bathing to facilitate movement from one room to another.

On the other hand, the characteristics of sedative music—ballads and lullabies—include unaccented beats, no syncopation, slow tempos, and little percussive sound. This is the best choice when preparing for bed or any change in routine that might cause agitation.

Responses that are opposite of those expected can occur and are likely due to a person’s specific associations with the piece or style of music.

Agitation Management. Non-verbal individuals in late dementia often become agitated out of frustration and sensory overload from the inability to process environmental stimuli. Engaging them in singing, rhythm playing, dancing, physical exercise, and other structured music activities can diffuse this behavior and redirect their attention.

For best outcomes, carefully observe an individual’s patterns in order to use music therapies just prior to the time of day when disruptive behaviors usually occur.

Emotional Closeness. As dementia progresses, individuals typically lose the ability to share thoughts and gestures of affection with their loved ones. However, they retain their ability to move with the beat until very late in the disease process.

Ambulatory individuals can be easily directed to couple dance, which may evoke hugs, kisses or caresses; those who are no longer walking can follow cues to rhythmically swing their arms. They often allow gentle rocking or patting in beat to the music and may reciprocate with affection.

An alternative to moving or touching is singing, which is associated with safety and security from early life. Any reciprocal engagement provides an opportunity for caregivers and care receivers to connect with one another, even when the disease has deprived them of traditional forms of closeness.

How-to of music therapy:

Early stage—

Go out dancing or dance in the house.

Listen to music that the person liked in the past—whether swing or Sinatra or salsa. Recognize that perceptual changes can alter the way individuals with dementia hear music. If they say it sounds horrible, turn it off; it may to them.

Experiment with various types of concerts and venues, giving consideration to endurance and temperament.

Encourage an individual who played an instrument to try it again.

Compile a musical history of favorite recordings, which can be used to help in reminiscence and memory recall.
Early and middle stages—

Use song sheets or a karaokeplayer so the individual can sing along with old-time favorites.
Middle stage—

Play music or sing as the individual is walking to improve balance or gait.

Do sing-alongs, with “When the Saints Go Marching In” or other tunes sung by rote in that person’s generation.

Play soothing music to provide a sense of comfort.

Exercise to music.

Do drumming or other rhythm-based activities.

Use facial expressions to communicate feelings when involved in these activities.
Contributed by Alicia Ann Clair, Ph.D., MT-BC, professor and director of the Division of Music Education and Music at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. “How-to” section contributed by Concetta M. Tomaino, DA, MT-BC, vice president for music therapy and director of the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function at Beth Abraham Family of Health Services, Bronx, NY.

For more information, connect with the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America’s licensed social workers. Click here or call 866.232.8484. Real People. Real Care.

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